The former savings bank on Main Street in Chester: buff brick under a dentilled pediment, with a clock set into the round opening and SAVINGS BANK cut into the frieze

Main Street · Chester, Connecticut

Six Main

A village savings bank converted to a restaurant, with the vaults, the ceiling and the night deposit kept in use.

The building carries two dates cut into the front: 1871 on one pilaster and 1902 on the other, with Savings Bank cut into the frieze between them. Buff brick, brownstone lintels, a granite base, and a dentilled pediment with a round opening at the peak. It sits a foot and a half off the sidewalk.

By the time we got there it had been offices for years. Partition walls, dropped soffits, track lighting, blue carpet, French doors into what had been the banking room.

The job was to take all of that out and put a working restaurant in: dining room, bar, service bar, a full commercial kitchen with a teaching space, walk-in refrigerator, staff office, new restrooms, new heating and cooling, a tie-in to town sewer, paving, patios, awnings and lighting.

Three vaults came with the building. One of them became the waitstaff service station.

What the offices were hiding

The pressed-tin ceiling, painted green, running above later office partition walls and doorways — Pressed tin, painted green, running straight over the partitions that were put under it later.

The banking room's ceiling had never gone anywhere. It is pressed tin, in two levels (a raised center panel inside a heavy cove and dentil cornice, with a lower band around it) and the office partitions had simply been built up to it and stopped. Take the partitions out and the room comes back at full size, ceiling already finished.

The new restaurant layout taped out in white lines across the old blue and maroon office carpet — The plan taped out on the office carpet before anything came down.

The bank before work, with a for-lease sign on the adjoining wing and a blank round opening in the pediment — Before. Note the round opening at the peak, empty.

II.

The banking room, as a dining room

The finished dining room under the pressed-tin ceiling, now painted cream, with arched windows and a banquette along one wall — Same ceiling, same cove, no partitions.

A long communal table down the center of the dining room, arched windows with fanlights along the street wall — The arched openings are the bank's. The sash in them is not.

New millwork in the room (the chair rail, the cap, the casings) was run to match details salvaged out of the demolition rather than to a catalog profile.

III.

Two bars, two tops

A small cast-iron safe door with a combination dial and two lever handles, set low into an office wall in painted casing, beside a cast-iron radiator — One of three. A safe door at floor level, cased and painted like a cupboard, behind office carpet.

The main bar with a pale cast concrete top and dark base, back-bar shelving behind, under arched windows — Main bar. The top is cast concrete.

The service bar with a dark wood top, a brass overhead stemware rack and a diamond-lattice wine rack behind — Service bar, wood top, stemware overhead.

Both tops were made for the building. Cast concrete moves as it cures and cannot be trimmed to fit afterwards, so the base has to be right before the top is poured; a wood top can be scribed on site.

IV.

Kitchen, plumbing and restrooms

The commercial kitchen: range and convection oven under a stainless hood, walk-in refrigerator door at the end, seamless red resinous floor — Range, hood, walk-in. The floor is poured seamless and coved up the wall.

The kitchen floor is a seamless resinous pour turned up at every wall so there is no joint to trap anything. Behind it went a 1,500-gallon grease interceptor, a new 6-inch sewer run of about eighty feet out to the town line, and a separate four-inch run carrying kitchen effluent only.

A restroom with red marble wainscot and a wall-hung counter open underneath for wheelchair clearance — The counter is hung, not floored, so there is knee clearance under the lavatory.

The old side entry before work: a single glazed door on a concrete stoop above a dry-laid stone retaining wall, with an electric meter on the brick — The side door as we found it. Three steps and no landing.

Access and the flood zone

The side elevation with the long rear wing, striped awning over the side patio and dome awnings over the front windows — The wing running back along the side street, with the patio under the awning.

The work that decided this job was accessible entry and egress in a building whose front door sits eighteen inches off a public sidewalk, on a lot that runs down to Pattaconk Brook and is mapped in the flood zone.

Fill cannot be brought in to raise a landing on a floodplain lot, so the new steps and landing sit on a reinforced concrete slab carried above existing grade instead. An accessible space and a widened concrete pad went in off the side street, and the parking was laid out to twenty-three spaces against the seventeen the zoning asks for at one space per three seats plus one per employee.

VI.

Putting the clock back

The building at night, uplit, with the clock lit in the pediment and both date stones visible — The round opening at the peak, no longer empty.

The pediment was built for a clock and had spent a long time without one. A replica went back into the opening, and the front of the building is lit so that it reads after dark from both ends of Main Street.

The bank's night deposit box: a steel plate set into the brick side wall under a small shed hood, with a lantern beside it

The night deposit

A steel drop set into the side wall under its own little hood, with a lamp over it, so that a shopkeeper could bank the day's takings after closing without anybody having to be inside.

The drop was converted into the menu board on the front of the building.

Recognition

Best Adaptive Reuse2013 HOBI Awards

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